iPaulina

The day of Labour’s manifesto launch, John Prescott was campaigning in Rhyl, North Wales. For the event, he had to walk to the local campaign venue past a protest against Labour’s fox-hunting laws, where the agricultural worker Craig Evans threw an egg at him at ‘almost point-blank range’, as it was described at the time by Sky News. Prescott swung round and punched Evans on the jaw; a fight ensued; and this was all captured by TV cameras. Prescott avoided apologising, as a formal apology would almost inevitably have had to be followed by his resignation from the cabinet. In the end, he came through a sudden spurt of press attention mostly unscathed, and even benefited from it in the eyes of some voters. Why?

Firstly, the Labour Party quickly realised that a lot of voters were actually on Prescott’s side. I think that this public sympathy towards Prescott came about for a number of reasons, partly because the incident played into Prescott’s image as a tough ex-boxer: he had the physical strength and confidence to pull the punch off and could argue that he was justified in doing so. Moreover, many people felt that they could identify with him. Prescott balanced out Blair’s smooth-talking and, as many Labour supporters saw it, right-leaning style. He was an influential figure in what is known as ‘Old Labour’, which had held strong ties with trade unions and had been the party of socialism until the emergence of the New Labour movement in the late 1990s, led by Blair.

Therefore, the response to the Prescott Punch was also strongly rooted in trade union culture: Rodney Bickerstaffe, a former trade union leader and Prescott’s longtime friend, pulled Prescott up on his punch technique after the gaffe. Bickerstaffe teased Prescott, joking that earlier in life, he would have been able to knock the man out and that he was ‘losing his touch’. The punch also worked in Prescott’s favour by making him appear human and authentic, set apart from the carefully managed Labour campaign of 2001.

Press coverage at the time was also fairly sympathetic to Prescott. Many newspapers enjoyed poking fun at him (for example, the Sun dubbed him ‘Two Jags’ for owning fancy cars), so coverage tended more towards taunting than condemning: the headline ‘Two Jabs’ was on the front page of the Sun the morning after the punch.